I understand the developers wanting a money sink for the players since I was fucking loaded after I completed the main game, but it is it worth it?

Some of the bonuses you can get are pretty cool, but having to destroy my glyphs plus 10000 gold doesn't seem worth it. Am I wrong?

I mean, the game is easy enough as it is, so no, I don't really think it's worth it unless you're on NG+ Death March or something.

It's more like 50k to get to the really good stuff.

You certainly don't need any of it to complete the content, but some of them add some neat effects, or nice quality of life things (like automatically casting quen or letting you equip heavy armor and still get the superior bonus from light or medium armor) and I think thats reason enough if you have the spare gold. It's not really an issue of easy or hard, it's what makes the game fun. If some of those effects sound fun then do it. If you don't care then don't.

I think the Runewright stuff has some neat effects, but I'm not sure that it's worth giving up the rune slots for. Then again, there's a bug that increases your sword damage every time you remove enchanted torso piece and reapply it. You do that in conjunction with one of the armour general skills and you'll find yourself hitting enemies for thousands of damage. It's a nice supplement for sign builds, I find.

Also works with Sign Intensity, but anything above 300% doesn't have any effect.

The runeword or glyph that I found to be really useful is the one that extends the Whirl/Red range. It's really useful.

For the most part, no, it's not worth the trouble. The only thing I found useful was the rune that makes arrows automatically deflect off your armor.

Having an automatic quen sign and having kills regen stamina was pretty nice.

Hmm, I feel like for my sword character the Runewords are mostly pointless.

I don't use Whril/Rend (they're bad). Extra damage from healing sounds nice on paper, but then you realize how much healing you would need between each blow, and how much healing items give you, it's also pointless, plain damage runes are better. Vit/Sta regeneration after getting full adrenaline bar takes too long to activate and when it does it's not exactly massive either and I'd rather keep the dmg bonus from adrenaline. Automatic quen at the start of fights is saving 1 button press I do anyway. Arrow deflection could be useful early game, but lategame arrow shooting humans are the least of your worries.

The only runeword I really found useful is the infinite duration for armor/weapon buffs. And the armor runeword that lets you convert armor types as that makes it so you can pretty much just wear what you want and think looks good.

I could definitely see a sign build getting much more out of them. That igni chain, aard buff and axii chain + buff are all pretty much just direct improvements to the tools you already use.